CLONE WARS

Lewis Carr Journeys to the Dark Side of AI

It seems that almost every tool these days has AI content generation tools built into the software. With a single click and a prompt, your text box or page is now filled with beautifully crafted words. “Write me a course on Cheese Production”, or “Write me a course on Fire Safety Training”. And, in moments, you have your course.

But with all these tools piggybacking from the same Language Models (ChatGPT, Grok, Claude), we are in danger of every course sounding the same. Even image generation is getting very samey.

Combine this with, say, Articulate Rise (which allows little to no front-end customisation), and voila, we have an army of cloned courses.

Now, the Clone Wars don’t end there. Ask for an image of an anime office worker, and yes, you will end up with multiple Ghiblification versions of virtually the same characters and a bunch of Ghibli fans knocking on your door shouting at you for disrespecting their love for art.

Instructional Designers can overcome this by spending longer with their prompts, refining the text, running it back through Grammarly, and tweaking the images back and forth. But let’s face it: AI is supposed to save time, and all this faffing about goes against the purpose of rapid course generation.

So, where does this leave us? Well, in the short term, we will have an abundance of courses, all looking and feeling the same. We will become industrial factories churning out the same shitty courses, in the same way Shein churns out shitty clothes.

In the longer term, I fear it will be the end of online courses as we know them. Why even bother creating a course when you can just give the prompt to the user? Cut out the instructional designer altogether? If standard practice is to ask AI to “create a course on cheese”, why not simply ask the learner to type “Teach me about Cheese?”

I appreciate that the Subject Matter Expert might tweak an AI course, sense check it, edit it and the like. That’s the argument for not simply giving the learner the prompt box directly. However, we are forgetting one thing: the Subject Matter Expert is also in danger of getting cut out of this process too. As AI becomes more accurate (as it’s poised to become), then it’s not a question of how; it’s a question of when.